Now, the newest conspiracy, straight from right-wing tabloid The Daily Caller, is that the whole financial crisis is rooted not in credit default swaps, derivatives, over-extension of credit, or in massive de-regulations, but instead it is all to blame on Barack Obama.

The key to their claim, of course, is their assertion that Obama, fresh out of law school, was the lead attorney for the Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank discrimination case, where the court ruled that Citibank had been discriminatory in its lending practices. Where did they get that idea? Well, because his name was at the top of the list of attorney’s. The Daily Caller of course failed to check with a court to discover that attorneys were listed alphabetically by first name, and B comes before the first names of the other attorneys, Fay, Jeffery, John, Judson and Sara. The court documents list Fay Clayton as the lead attorney, with it clearly marked on all pages, “ATTORNEY TO BE CONTACTED” under her name. No such indication exists under Barack Obama on any court documents.

Obama is not even listed as ever having appeared in court, nor is he listed as part of the original complaint. He was brought in to handle paperwork for the main attorneys, typical work for someone fresh out of law school. In total, Obama worked 138 hours on the case according to records, a month of work for the multi-year case.

But did this case cause the crisis? Not at all. It only prevented the use of race for determination of mortgages. Some of course will claim that minorities have more defaults. This is just racism at work. The cause for the greater defaults is that, being denied access to traditional lines of credit, minorities are frequently victims of predatory lending, such as those behind the subprime crisis.

The blaming of the financial crisis on subprime mortgage holders has been prevalent in the right-wing media. That the cause of defaults was the ratcheting up of rates, or the unethical predatory nature of the system, or the derivatives created by the financial institutions, is irrelevant. Blame the minorities, that is the battle cry. The fact that subprime mortgage lenders lacked any regulatory oversight is also lost on them. It is all blame the black/hispanic/asian/gay/woman/whatever. They cannot blame the rich white male banker. The banker is the poor victim of all of these minorities wanting to be treated fairly.

Another case of racism disguising itself as news. Expect this new story to be making the rounds as we get into November, and then to place the blame on the President who joined the case 2 years after it began, for a total of 1 month of work. Just bigotry, nothing new to see.